PRIVATE CHARITY

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 150, 21 March 1939, Page 3

PRIVATE CHARITY

Effect Of Socialism “The tendency of a Socialist Government is to discourage private charity and to aim at having all institutions under State control. From the materialistic point of view this is perhaps reasonable and right. But there is something a State can never do, and indeed does not want to do, and that is to train up the characters and personalities of children and young people and ‘rescued’ people on a spiritual foundation and a religious basis,” writes the Rev. W. J. Durrad, the vicar, in the Khandallah and Ngaio Anglican Church “Bulletin.” “A thoroughly socialized State, which seems to be so attractive to many people now, would in a short time prove to be a spiritual disaster,” he says. “Our Church is out for more than a glorified fitness week. Even ‘a sound mind in a sound body’ gets only a part of the way toward our goal. We want nothing less than the building up of each person, body, mind and spirit, as a child of God. No State home, run by tax-money taken from people of every denomination or none, can ever do much for the spiritual life of anj’one. That is why, as a Church, we must never ‘let down’ our homes, or hand over our children and young people to the State or even to any religious institution which gives them a training different from our own form of faith which is dear to us»”